So, been using Ask Mr. Robot for a while now. I am an Arcane Mage in Wrath. While I kept the fight lengths to 180 seconds (3 minutes) the recommendations have been about what I expect. However, now that I have moved the fight length up to 600 seconds (as many of the ICC fights are about 5 minutes) I am now getting recommendations to increase my Int and MP5 (like I was a healer) and reducing both my spellpower and haste which are the two most important stats for an Arcane Mage. Is my setup wrong? These results cannot be correct in my opinion. Thanks!!
You are running out of mana, so the optimizer is finding that you can get higher overall damage by casting more spells in the fight, instead of each spell being a bit stronger.
The calculations assume you are trying to do damage 100% of the time with no down times where you would sit there and regenerate mana. If you find that, during the fights, you have significant lengths of time where you are not trying to do DPS, reduce the fight length to the total amount of time where you are actively trying to do damage.
I know the results sometimes seem different than expected, but I think the calculations are sound.
So, since my Evocation is on a two-minute cooldown and the simulator is not taking that into consideration, I would be better setting my fight time around using it? Thanks!
Oh, as an addendum I take it the simulator is also not taking Mana Gem use into consideration? Thanks!
1.) This is not a simulator - we use a mathematical model instead, for many reasons.
2.) The model incorporates both evocation and mana gems
KK, so I found the issue. There appears to be an issue with the flag in the Raid Debuffs section. When I setup without Curse of Elements flagged, I get the results I expect: aad654a9f002471199c4feb62d9f01c1
However, when I put a tick in the Curse of Elements field in the Raid Debuffs section, I now get the healing setup that is a direct DPS loss: 48dd748816e74a62ad31073e5544da80
This seems like a bug to me since the Curse of Elements should increase damage and therefore require less mana?
Thanks.
That is a very interesting result!
You have managed to find a specific setup where you are right at some tipping point. The model is looking to maximize total DPS. When you are mana-limited, that is going to be some balance between getting stats which make each spell do more damage vs getting stats that let you cast more spells.
Applying curse of the elements increases the damage of your spells enough so that getting more mana to cast a few extra spells ends up maximizing the dps.
This is not a bug! The model adapts to all the given constraints - fight length, buffs, debuffs, gear available, etc. I would argue that situations like this are exactly why one would use a gear optimizer in the first place. How would you ever guess to do this?
I also get that changing all your gems is expensive, especially when we are talking about a very theoretical dps increase. It would be reasonable for you to adjust the settings to where the optimizer does not suggest mana increases over spell power.